Colour tattoo of a barn owl in flight, with soft blue, teal, purple and pink wash-like shading, on the side of a ribcage.

Watercolour barn owl in flight on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A barn owl with outstretched wings is shown mid-flight, with the face, body and feathers rendered in soft, detailed strokes. The linework is loose and the shading blends smoothly, giving a painted watercolour appearance. Blue, teal, purple and pink tones dominate, and the design sits diagonally across the side of the ribs.

Ribs Owl Barn owl Bird Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was held in the old schoolhouse at Hobb's Cross, the only building in the parish still with a bell rope, and by nine o'clock the classroom windows had fogged with the breath of forty-odd people who had not seen one another since 1979. Nobody noticed the barn owl until Derek Sowerby, who had sat at the back and eaten paste, stood up to make a speech and the bird came down from the rafters in one slow loop and landed on the top of the blackboard.

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The older folk said the owl had lived in the belfry since the school closed, and that it came down only for those who had left something behind. Margaret Fell, who had taught them all their letters, said nothing at first. She had kept a register of every lost thing in that room: a glove, a front tooth, a promise made in the cloakroom. The owl turned its head and looked at each of them in turn, and where its gaze rested a feather drifted down, pale teal at the tip, fading to lilac, then to a warm rose at the quill.

Derek picked one up and asked what it was for. Margaret said the owl had been waiting for someone to admit what they had taken. For a long while nobody spoke. Then Joan Penhale, from the third row, confessed she had kept the class dinner money the whole of Easter term and spent it on a pair of red boots. Others followed, a little at a time, until the room was full of small, honest sins and the feathers lay along the window sills like a fall of weather.

When the last confession was made the owl rose through the broken pane with its wings spread wide, and the light went with it. In the morning the caretaker found the old cash tin on Margaret's desk, the lid open, the coins counted out in neat stacks, and a single feather laid across the top like a bookmark.